Google Eyes New Email Service, Expansion

GillBates0 writes "According to a CNN/Reuters story, Google is developing a service to attach its lucrative keyword-based advertising to email: ''I'm sure Google is getting more and more concerned about locking in users. It wouldn't surprise me if they did something very sophisticated with e-mail,' said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, who tracks the industry.' Apparently, Google has purchased an e-mail management software maker and registered the domain name googlemail.com. The article also speculates that Google is slowly on the way to becoming a full-fledged portal, with the gradual addition of more and more portal-like features like Froogle."

Interesting things at google.

[tljohnsn]

Is google going to eventually require some kind of stripped down registration for this service? They've slowly (over the past year or so), started to roll out a pervasive registration for their various services (Adsense, Adwords), and optional registration would make sense here too.

On the other side of things, Google stands to make a killing here. Google can sell a new class of ads to people like plumbers, who don't need a webpage. In fact, they could possibly host a minimal web page for those kind of advertisers who just want to show some simple text and services.

Hey, perhaps Google wants to give me some kind of idea fee???

Google does it again...

[danielrm26]

I for one am dumping (or at least sidelining) my other webmail accounts immediately if "googlemail" has the features I need. When is the last time you saw Google down?

At the moment, they can do little wrong in my eyes, and I thouroughly expect to enjoy anything coming out of their company. I just hope that as they grow into the beast they are sure to become that they don't lose the purity and creativity that sets them apart from the rest.

Improve your Google efficiency:
http://www.dmiessler.com/google

Froogle

[Rkane]

I don't know about any of you, but "Froogle" hasn't impressed me yet. I am a frequent user of pricewatch [pricewatch.com] and techbargains [techbargains.com], and Froogle hasn't even come close to matching these. Call me old fashioned, but I sincerely hope that google stays away from the portal business.

The near future.......?

[bc90021]

You log into your GoogleMail account, and it has emailed you an entire evening's worth of web crawling for the data you were looking for. It's searched for places for your for your next vacation, and has managed to provide you with not only information, but Froogle'd for the best prices too. It's suggested things you'd like to do, and gone out and found the most popular sites about that as well. All you have to do is log into your Google HomePage and accept its suggestions, or negotiate with your own little GoogleBot for other venues.

Could this be the beginning of intelligent software agents? It would seem that if anyone could bring such a thing to us, it would be the Google folks...

Portals

[FooAtWFU]

So what's wrong if Google becomes a portal? I certainly see enough people complaining about it. As long as the search engine still works pretty well...
As for "locking in" users, I would hardly compare this to the wonderful lock-in schemes we've seen out of Redmond.
Google email... would that mean that they parse my text and attach a keyword-based ad to it? :)

portals

[funny-jack]

The difference, the way I see it, between Google and the other so-called Internet "portals" out there is that Google develops useful technologies one at a time, tweaking them here and there, and then adds them to the main site when they think that is is a useful enough feature to have. Yahoo and the like just threw together as many features as they could think of, slapped it into a pretty (debatable) interface, and hoped the feature-bloat would attract people.

Google continues to expand their services but...

[HMA2000]

Is it just me or does it seem like google is getting further and further away from what they are good at (excellent search results) and closer and closer to a Yahoo type service?

I am sure the money must be great for introducing services like these but aren't they canabalizing their value by introducing these new services while at the same time polluting their search results?

Free?

[vpscolo]

You have to wonder who google is going to get people into this. Will it be the traditional yahoo/hotmail approach where you get 5MB free and then upgrade, or prehaps they will just go fora decent free emails service ala normal ISP. Intresting to see how they make money

Rus

Then again...

[loserbert]

...all of this could be driven by the fact that they are working on an IPO.

They may be the kindest, gentlest search engine and downright good people, but cash is cash. Everybody wants more. More features means more users means more money.

Google needs help

[DRue]

Google is still on top of the market. But, more and more often I am getting bad results from a search. By bad results I mean that instead of getting the best site, I get the most commercial site.

I would really like google to get a feature that instead of listing the name and summary of a web page, lists JUST the domains of returned results. i.e. if I search for "mp3 player", i get back
www.apple.com
www.rio.com
www.othermp3play er.com

--- not buying google IPO

Anyone else having trouble with google?

[Denver_80203]

Seems like in the last few months, Google searches have turned up other "search engines" as a top result or 4 out of the top 5. So, as an example, I search for "foo" and most of the top results lead me to another (crappy) google like site with it's own results for "foo". The feeling I get from those sites is similiar to those crappy sites you end up on when mis-spelling a URL.

Re:Interesting things at google.

[LnxAddct]

On the other side of things, Google stands to make a killing here. Google can sell a new class of ads to people like plumbers, who don't need a webpage.

Back a few months ago I was developing software and the question arose as to whether or not it'd be best to charge for the software or to include ads in it (i.e. Kazaa). It was concluded that Kazaa like ads were too intrusive and text based ads would be appropriate. I emailed Google about whether or not their AdWords could be used in a software environment and they said not at the current moment, but its a possibility for the future. The guy was real nice and forwarded the idea onto some more people inside Google. Personally I think that text based ads would be perfect for situations where you can't open source your project, but you can't (or don't want to)charge for it either, but still want to make profit. For example, you could place a nice little unobtrusive text ad at the bottom of your menus or something. Who knows, maybe we'll see google coming out with this kind of feature in the future.
Regards,
Steve

Re:Too Good To Be True

[Short Circuit]

At this point, there's no need to be worried about their email-based stuff. If I had a machine to download all the mail to, I'd subscribe to their news update service...They do a Google news keyword search and email you the news results every so often. That's what I call staying up-to-date.

Here [google.com]'s an example link. Look at the bottom of the page.

Bad move

[Krafty Koder]

it's a bad bad move on google's part. The infrastructure needed (and the sysadmin) to provide a robust, spam-free , web based email system is of a sheer magnitude greater than just being pure search.
For starters , the tech support will ramp up ,and add to google's costs. And Googlemail will become the numero uno target for spammers.
If I were the Google founders, I quite honestly wouldn't bother - it's to much hassle and dilutes the Google "brand".
But then again, the IPO is coming up, so having a "webmail" component is an easy sell to "analysts" in Five Points ...ahem... Wall Street I mean.

The likely future...

[blunte]

might be similar to what you describe, but you left out something important.

The crawling that was done for you was silently biased toward Google advertising clients.

And the travel suggestions have been biased toward Google advertising clients.

Oh, and the Froogle selections also were biased toward paying ad customers.

Maybe that's all ok (legally and economically), but it's probably not what you would expect, and as such you'll be working from bad data to make your decisions.

Re:Google needs help

[mopslik]

...instead of getting the best site, I get the most commercial site... i.e. if I search for "mp3 player" ...

The problem with this example, of course, is that the context is rather difficult to discern. Are most web surfers looking for a review of a certain MP3 player, or are they looking for a cheap online store to snag an easy Xmas gift? Both contexts would demand two different sets of search results.

To find reviews and datasheets (or other non-commercial pages), it's pretty much necessary to add +review or +specifications to your search. Now, the fact that these results are sub par is another matter entirely.

As for returning just the domains, I'm not too sure why you'd want that. First of all, Google indicates the domain below the site's description. Why not look there? I find it's easy to eliminate bogus links that way. Second, searches would be good if domain names were immediately identifiable by product names, but they are often not. For example, I just installed FreePDF on a few Windows machines. The domain returned would be "www.webxd.com", which would leave me wondering if that was really the correct site or just another Spam farm.

Still, interesting...

Re:Portals

[Anonymous Coward]

To me, portal has always been a buzzword that translated to information overload. Google has always tried to avoid information overload in their search engine. I figure, if anybody can do a portal right, it will be Google.

Pipe dream "what if":

[mcc]

What would be interesting is if what Google did was release spam blocking software.

It seems to me that blocking spam, and weeding out google-exploit spam search results, are the same sort of text processing / arms race sort of problem. Research on the latter, which is what Google is working on right now, will probably lead to techniques helpful in the former. So if they're looking at expanding into email, it seems like that would be a likely area for them to expand into...

Of course, given, they aren't right now doing a good JOB of filtering out the google-exploit spam results, but I expect they'll unveil some kind of brandnamed technology attempting to deal with the problem sometime shortly before MSN's search engine is released...

I just hope if they offer email addresses, they offer some, you know, better domans. I'm sorry, I don't want to be "[e-mail]".

Nothing here

[metalhed77]

You only have to register for things that have some business angle to them. Registering for adwords makes sense. Registering to post on google groups makes sense. Registering to use an email address, well you kind of need to. I sincerely doubt that you'll need to log in to search or anything though. My mom gets confused enough trying to log in to windows XP. As far as portal goes it looks like they track people based more on what they're viewing at the present time than historical stats.

Re:Prepare to be underhwelmed

[Uber Banker]

Because Google have a great brand for a straightforward trustworthy service. Maybe someone would like to swap their [e-mail] address for [e-mail].

The geek cachet will wear off quick after everyone you despise starts using googlemail

Ah, but how about [e-mail]! And if everyone starts using googlemail, then they have won.

Re:Oy.

[ahdeoz]

Google is suffering from the theoretical Linux virus problem. While it actually *is* more resistant to abuse than other systems, it is not invulnerable. In fact, the main reason that Google (in the past) returned better search results than other sites, is because the abusers were targeting Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, Altavista, or whatever. Also, there were fewer of them. The only way to overcome the search abuse will be to become an underdog with a new algorithm who the abusers are *not* targeting.

Re:Oy.

[40000]

Make the search more useful with selectable result weightings based on
a)E-commerce type code - gets rid of amazon referral sites
b)Use of the copyright symbol - brings personal web pages to the top of the list
c)Too many links - mods down dodgy portals
d)Size of text blocks on page (would be in favour of an e-book)
Ultimately some kind of 'personality' rating for web pages.

Of course...

[skzbass]

there's the timeless classic of when you do a "i'm feeling lucky" of "miserable failure".

Google has flaws - take googlewashing

[richard_za]

Google does have flaws too! Take a look at the googlewashing of miserable failure [google.com] it brings up the official biography of George Bush [google.com] as the first link. More coverage of this issue can be found on Searchenginewatch.com [searchenginewatch.com].

Re:Too Good To Be True

[The Clockwork Troll]

and google's undoing will be the fact that it can't help but index these link farms.

"search engine optimization" tactics are reason #1 why it is not game over in the search engine space.

deciding relevance is NP-hard.

WARNING: post is plagiarized

[Gzip Christ]

The parent post was copied verbatim from a Slashdot post from last year [slashdot.org]. The parent poster is karma whoring. Check out his posting history [slashdot.org] for other examples of this.

specific applications, yes; portal, no

[superfast-scooter]

i hope they seriously do not entertain thoughts of being a portal. that's what everyone lost out with a few years ago, and things are no different now. let the google labs keep working on specific projects, and offer them as different services, as they do now; instead of becoming a yahoo.

Re:Thus it begins

[splattertrousers]

Someone better is almost certainly out there waiting to be noticed. When Google starts to suck, that better search engine might get its chance.

GoogleMail

[YrWrstNtmr]

is already in use, albeit in a different form, than a regular email service.

CapeScience [capeclear.com] built an email interface to the search engine. Send an email, get your Google search results back via email. Lots of places [google.com] around are calling it GoogleMail

Re:Bad move

[FreshFunk510]

You talk about Googlemail costs but what about profits?

I'm sure there would be advertising on Googlemail too and that it would be at least AS popular as advertising on Google search.

Re:Interesting things at google.

[Inhibit]

started to roll out a pervasive registration for their various services (Adsense, Adwords)

I should hope they have registration for those two services. For anyone whom doesn't know those are both back-end advertising services offered by google. Adsense is a way to post ads on websites and Adwords is a service to serve up your ads to google's site and Adsense users.

It'd be pretty hard to pay out on the Adsense or charge for the Adwords without registration.. and there's no sense in registering twice if you'd like to use both. I don't see this as being very ominous.

Re:Oy.

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Google has also changed their search weightings to put Shopping sites ahead of real people talking about products.

This is as bad or worse than the stupid linkfarm sites, and a sure sign that Google has been taken over by dunderhead MBAs.

Re:Well Actually

[soothsayer491]

I have to say that I used to be a member of this service called Bluebottle, it did everything that shadango does and more....even POP access, then it got abused to no end and now it sucks! But yea so now I'm on the shadango train as well it's solid. Here is what i like:

• You can check all POP/IMAP accounts from one interface(even yahoo, hotmail, and aol(and they're filtered!))
• Realtime access to your IMAP accts
• 20MB of space for each address you have
• Calender
• You can make "disposable" addresses
• The customer service they have is unbeatable...unlike the big corps like yahoo!
• There's no annoying ads on the site!
• Lastly, they keep making improvements, very active development

I just hope that it can stick around and not go down the road that bluebottle did!

That's my two cents

Willie

Re:Oy.

[unother]

Moreover, Yahoo! was only a useful "catalog of sites" because that was early days on the web.

Yes, Yahoo! implemented searching as well, but a million years ago, it was self-registration that created that "catalog of sites" (e.g. 1995). Searching came later, and was organic, but Yahoo! in no way was ever the dominant search engine, certainly not in the way Google has become. They were a directory service initially, and thus becoming a "Portal" as they are today was the direct evolution upward from that model.

IMHO the biggest loser from Google's emergent dominance was Altavista, who for a while were certainly the cognoscenti's search-engine of choice.

Real world example of Google suckage

[DeadSea]

I did this search about a month ago, reported the results to Google and it still sucks donkey balls:

Google Search: "monty python" "usage of fuck" [google.com]

Yes it is a "porny" search term, but the site that has listing 1-300 demonstrates that it is possible (and easy) to really truly spam google.

It looks like some enterprising young porn pusher, has made a page generator. They put very similar pages on a variety of porny domain names then linked them all together. Google sucks it in and slurps it up like you wouldn't believe.

Re:Prepare to be underhwelmed

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Yahoo's 5 MB of text, compressible down to around 1MB, are sure expensive. Let's see: Disks are about $1/GB, so we're easily talking five tenths of a cent right there.

It's probably better to pay the $19 and get, what, 19GB of storage space, right?

Re:Oy.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with an open-source search engine is that anyone can instantly find out exactly what its ranking system is, making it easy to abuse.

Re:Prepare to be underhwelmed

[You're All Wrong]

"becoming a full-fledged portal,"

Don't rely on them. If they are going to become a portal, then tey're fucked, just likehe rest of them. Did no-one learn from the last 5 years?

YAW.

Re:Oy.

[instarx]

I agree. Google results are becoming more and more irrelevant, with the first page of hits being taken up by a few major eCommerce organizations. This is mostly the result of abuse by a few companies working the Google algorithms since most of the ads are really for the same service, just using different web pages linked to each other. There must be a term for this but I don't know it.

I am very tired of clicking link after link that purport to have reviews of what I am looking for only to discover it has nothing of the sort and is just another version of Amazon, Nextag, OneCall or Yahoo or with exactly the same information. It particularly irks me to be tricked to a site that that claims a "Review of Acme Rocket Launcher" that just says, "Sorry there are no reviews of Acme Rocket Launcher submit your review here, but get best price for Acme Rocket Launcher here."

No, Google doesn't do everything perfectly by a long shot.

Re:Oy.

[minus28]

Searching from within Europe, one of the worst perpetrators for this is kelkoo, which offers price comparisons for an item, between different sites (and it usually does have prices which are amongst the cheapest, so can be useful). However Kelkoo will regularly appear in the first ten listings, often several times- then as you say, have no actual links to the product you are looking for, therefore in this case you cant buy it from a partner anyway!! A total waste of everyones time.